Chiyoda no o-oku

A print from the celebrated series "Chiyoda no O-oku" — depicting the inner palace of the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo Castle, the domain of the shogun's wives and concubines that was one of the most restricted and mythologized spaces in all of Japan. Chikanobu's O-oku series was among his most successful publications, satisfying enormous public curiosity about a world that had been absolutely closed to outside scrutiny during the Tokugawa era and whose rituals and inhabitants were matters of intense speculation and romantic imagination.